NASHVILLE (AP) - The Tennessee Department of Education is making some changes to a waiver that would allow the state to opt out of the No Child Left Behind law.

President Barack Obama announced in September that he's giving states the option. U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has warned that 82 percent of schools in the country could be labeled failures next year if the law is not changed.

To get a waiver, states must agree to education reforms the White House favors - from tougher evaluation systems for teachers and principals to programs helping minority students.

Tennessee Education Commissioner Kevin Huffman told reporters in a conference call Monday that the state's waiver application requires more specificity and some new requirements, such as dividing schools into categories with targeted interventions or rewards for each group.

For instance, schools will be recognized for their high performance and rapid growth; then there will be those singled out for low proficiency and large achievement gaps between subgroups of students defined by race, economic status, disability and English proficiency.

Huffman said there will be an opportunity for those schools that are successful to share what they're doing with struggling schools, which will be given the necessary resources by the state to improve.

"This will be challenging work, but our districts believe they can do this," he said.

Huffman cited Memphis' Booker T. Washington as a high school that has improved drastically.

Graduation rates at the school, which is in a poor, crime-ridden neighborhood, have risen impressively in just three years. The school won a national competition to secure Obama as its commencement speaker in May by demonstrating how it overcame challenges through innovations such as separate freshman academies for boys and girls.

"Booker T. Washington High School is no longer a story about what's gone wrong in education," the president said in a weekly radio and Internet address a few days after the commencement. "It's a story about how we can set it right. We need to encourage this kind of change all across America."

Huffman agreed.

"Those are the types of schools that I believe we can learn a lot from," he said.

In July, preliminary results from the Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program showed math scores in third- through eighth-grade improved by 7 percent this year over last year. Reading scores improved by 3.7 percent.

In 18 school systems, student scores improved by 20 percent or more.

Still, under current No Child Left Behind guidelines, the state is only 41 percent proficient in math for those grades, and 48.5 percent in reading.

Tennessee was to submit its waiver application late Monday.

Education Department spokeswoman Kelli Gauthier has said that waivers are to be submitted by November so that they can be appro ved or denied by the end of the year.

Gov. Bill Haslam acknowledged the waiver process has taken longer than he expected, but believes it is "really important to Tennessee, both in principle that the state should be able to decide, but in reality, we have enough going on right now without schools abiding by some policies that they know they can't make."